Original title: Sette note in nero
It’s worth noting from the start that the mid-point twist in this sombre mediation on the nature of fate and the impossibility of escaping it, the last of Lucio Fulci’s gialli before he embarked on his hugely popular run of gore films starting with Zombi 2/Zombie Flesh Eaters/Zombie (1979), has been comprehensibly ruined by the American poster and the cover of the Scorpion Releasing blu-ray – and it’s going to get revealed here so proceed with the usual caution…
In Dover, England in 1959 a woman throws herself off the famous white cliffs to her death, a suicide witnessed at psychically by her young daughter Virginia, in Florence, Italy. Years later, now married to wealthy Italian businessman Francesco Ducci (Gianni Garko), Virginia (Jennifer O’Neill) seems to have come to terms with her trauma. But as Ducci leaves on a business trip, Virginia suddenly experiences a baffling vision of a woman being murdered. She realises that the old mansion that she and Ducci are planning to renovate bears a striking resemblance to house in her vision and determines to find out who the murder victim was and expose her killer. But there’s more to Virginia’s visions than at first meets the mind’s eye – her investigations implicate her husband when she discovers a body hidden in the walls and it turns out to be Ducci’s former lover who disappeared years earlier. But then comes the even more shocking revelation that what Virginia saw wasn’t a vision of the past but a premonition of the future – and possibly of her own death…
The opening sequence, with the suicide victim’s face being gorily ravaged as she bumps off the rocks on her way to the beach below, looks backwards and forwards – backwards to the climax of Fulci’s Non si sevizia un paperino/Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972) and forwards to his grislier offerings of the 1980s. As such, The Psychic – which can also be found under the unwieldy but typically giallo-esque title Murder to the Tune of the Seven Black Notes; it makes sense in context – is a transitional film for Fulci. It marked a temporary end to his brief dalliance with the giallo which encompassed Una sull’altra/One on Top of the Other (1969), Una lucertola con la pelle di donna/Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971) and Don’t Torture a Duckling (he returned to the form in 1984 with the lacklustre Murderock – Uccide a passo di danza (1984)) as he set sail for bloodier waters and international cult stardom with his subsequent zombie films.
The Psychic has all the Fulci tics and hallmarks that both entrance and infuriate. The frenetic, restless camerawork, full of zooms, pans, pull back reveals and those trademark huge close-ups of eyes, is equal parts exhilarating and annoying and Fulci is as disinterested in the narrative as ever. He co-wrote the screenplay with Roberto Gianviti and the tireless Dardano Sacchetti but doesn’t seem as concerned with the storyline, which sags alarmingly in the middle act, as with the often breath taking visuals. It was the fourth film that Fulci made with director of photography Sergio Salvati, a relationship that would endure through the director’s “golden age” and his work here is as ravishing as you’d expect. Virginia’s visions are particularly well done, having a genuinely nightmarish quality to them.
The script has nothing particularly new to bring to the party. It tips its hat to Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) (the fall from a gallery in a church under restoration), Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat (the heroine walled up alive) and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) (the original body in the wall, itself a nod towards Dario Argento’s Profondo rosso/Deep Red (1975), caught in the flash of a police photographer’s flashgun). The basic plot also owes something to Cornell Woolrich’s novel Night Has a Thousand Eyes, in which a fake psychic suddenly has what appears to be a genuine premonition of his own death.
But it’s so stylishly done that the occasional longueur and a lack of originality can be largely overlooked. Apart from the unconvincing rubber dummy ricocheting off the cliff face in the opening scene, there are few set-pieces, no Argento-like pyrotechnics but it’s a decent, steady giallo with a few silly moments (just how did they work out that the indistinct blur at the edge of the photograph was a horse’s head?) but is otherwise an intricately plotted (some might uncharitably say torturous) thriller, elegantly designed and shot and atmospherically directed by Fulci.
The Psychic fell through the cracks rather for many years, disappointing those who, like most of us, came to the film after Fulci’s crowd-pleasing zombie films and who found the mix of thriller, mystery and Gothic horror hard to get their heads around. There are none of the eyeball-puncturings, brain-rippings or flowing intestines of the later films but for those who enjoyed Fuci’s other gialli will find a lot to love here too. It’s a more restrained affair than the lurid psychedelia of One on Top of the Other and particularly Lizard in a Woman’s Skin but its sobriety is refreshing coming as it did from a time when the giallo had become increasingly outré to remain – unsuccessfully as it turned out – to remain a top box office draw. A year after The Psychic was released, John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) popularised the slasher film that would owe so much to the Italian films but the giallo had already had its heyday. Though they would still be made throughout the 1980s, apart from those directed by Dario Argento, few were a patch of those made in the 60s and early 70s.
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